Site Interpretations
Feature and artifact analysis was used to create a site-wide archaeological chronology for the features encountered during excavation. Site features were grouped into five broad temporal categories as shown in the figure below: late eighteenth century (1750–1800), early nineteenth century (1801–1845), mid-nineteenth century (1846–1875), late nineteenth century (1876–1900), and twentieth century (1901–2000). This grouping is based on feature date chronologies established during the artifact analysis. In some cases, a feature did not contain any diagnostic material and so could not be dated. While many such features were encountered, some of them could still be assigned a time period as they formed part of a larger feature complex that could be dated. ﷯ While these temporal categories are not strictly correlated with individual family occupations, in all cases associations can be made. The late eighteenth-century (green), early nineteenth-century (yellow), and mid-nineteenth-century (red) groupings are associated with the Brumbaugh family occupations. The late eighteenth-century grouping principally reflects Jacob Brumbaugh’s tenure, the early nineteenth-century grouping reflects Henry Brumbaugh’s tenure, and the mid-nineteenth-century group relates to the occupations of Andrew and Susan Brumbaugh. The late nineteenth-century (blue) group principally relates to the occupation of the Schindels and the dawn of the Kendle period, but the bulk of the Kendle and Grove occupations are represented by the twentieth-century (purple) group. Looking at the temporal breakdown of the features illustrated in the figure below it can be seen that those features related to late eighteenth-century occupation of the site are centered on the south side of the main house, near Feature 6, and encompass unknown outbuildings to the west. The early nineteenth-century grouping includes the large pathway complexes in the north and east yards and the stairs that lead to the basement of the northern extension of Feature 6. Additional potential outbuildings in the field to the southwest of Feature 6 suggest that the farmyard area during the early nineteenth century may have continued well south of the farmhouse. By the mid-nineteenth-century, the smokehouse (Feature 34) and its associated midden (Feature 70) were present. Late nineteenth-century features are limited to a fence line (Feature 54 complex), a privy (Feature 84), and a disturbance to one of the cobble pathways (Feature 96). The twentieth-century features principally include pipe trenches: one leading to the well, one to a water tank in the west yard, one to a septic tank inside Feature 16, and a complex of pipe trenches constituting the leach field in the fields to the south of the farmhouse. This temporal breakdown based on archaeological data provides a guide to the archaeological evidence; it shows how the built environment changed throughout the occupation history of the site, and forms a platform upon which interpretations about features and the people who made them relate to one another. The examination of features associated with the farmstead not only allowed archaeologists to understand what life was like for the people who called the farm home and to understand how the farm operated within the larger community. These broader interpretations are broken down into several categories: Click a category to learn more.
  • Household Economy
    Throughout its long occupation, the farm’s economy seems to have been driven by a common strategy: live off what you produce, sell as much as you can, and buy as little as you can. Based on the archaeological evidence, it appears that the wealth of the farm was not spent on fine living with the frivolous consumption of food and drink. Instead, the wealth appears to have been reinvested into the farm itself in the form of machinery and infrastructure improvements. Much of the wealth the Brumbaughs amassed by this strategy was subsequently reinvested into their farm, constantly improving and embracing innovations to maximize economic output. The rewards of these endeavors appeared to be less physical and more social, with wealth gaining them local social mobility, education, and respectability beyond the reach of some of their neighbors. While not ostentatious, this investment in the property was a way of showing affluence, especially in its well-built structures such as the Swisser barn, with its decorative brick vents. The construction of income-producing structures such as a smokehouse (Feature 34) assured the continuing generation of wealth. The farm occupants also spent their money on intangibles such as education and travel. Multiple generations of Brumbaugh children were sent to school, while Henry Brumbaugh was able to leave his farm and travel to Ohio in his old age. It appears that the strategy of self-sufficiency resulted in the accumulation of enough wealth to allow the families a degree of social freedom and mobility.
  • Cultivation
    The farm had a fairly steady emphasis on the production of cereal grains throughout its occupation, a farming strategy that seemed to remain the cornerstone of the farm’s activities. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Brumbaugh family appears to have pursued a policy of generalized agriculture that included the cultivation of a variety of cereals such as wheat, corn, barley, and rye. This was supplemented by the raising of cows and pigs and some orchard products. Jacob Brumbaugh also derived income and resources by maintaining several woodlots from which he cut and sold timber. This same type of agriculture was subsequently pursued by his son and grandsons well into the mid-nineteenth century. By this time the farm was run by Andrew Brumbaugh and it was considered an exceedingly productive Washington County farm. In his emphasis on wheat production, Andrew (and many of his neighbors) continued a local agricultural tradition with roots in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Andrew and his brother Samuel, who lived on an adjacent farm, seem to have worked collaboratively in the operation of their two farms. This strategy seems to have worked well for the family until the 1880s when the farm was divided between the descendants of Andrew and Sarah Brumbaugh with 162 3/4 acres of the original 274-acre property to be shared equally by siblings Upton Brumbaugh and Sallie Schindel and the operation of much of the farm was left to John Hershey, who rented and operated the Brumbaugh farm in exchange for a share of its harvest. According to the 1880 census, the farm’s value and formerly immense productivity seem to have declined markedly, undoubtedly as a result of its substantially reduced acreage and its transition from a family farm to a leased commercial property. While grains and hay remained important cash crops, longer-term investments such as the production of tree fruits, livestock rearing, and dairying declined markedly.
  • Livestock and Meat Consumption
    In contrast to cereal grain production, the raising of livestock fluctuated considerably during the mid-to late-nineteenth century, becoming a far less important contributor to the farm’s economic strategy by the Schindel period in the 1870s and remaining a lesser component thereafter. While the records demonstrate the value of swine and cattle to the farm and suggest that they were being raised in part for sale, they do not provide detail about how this practice influenced the consumption of livestock on the farm. The analysis of the meat cuts from animal bone found in archaeological deposits suggests one common thread: the almost exclusive presence of bones from the limbs and heads of animals and the conspicuous absence of animal torso cuts. The pork cuts found in the kitchen midden contexts around the house include cuts that in modern parlance are ham, ham-hock, and trotters as well as pig head. Of the beef represented, most of the meat came from the leg or shin, a cut currently known as beef shank, which is a slightly tougher cut that is best when slow cooked. In general, the fattier, meatier, and therefore more desirable, cuts along the belly and ribs of these animals are missing. The cuts of pork and beef recovered from the site are commonly smoked, which preserves them and allows them to be kept for a long period of time to provide food for domestic consumption. The bone assemblage suggests that the meatier and larger cuts found in an animal’s torso were likely harvested and sold while the somewhat less desirable cuts were kept and eaten on the farm itself, likely first having been preserved by smoking. That is not to say that they only consumed less profitable cuts, as sirloin is represented in the cattle cuts. Overall, however, the farm occupants seemed to find a way to both feed themselves amply and still successfully monetized their livestock via meat production for sale. It appears that livestock cultivation may have been one of the factors that made the Brumbaugh farm more successful than their neighbors; a willingness to give up the personal consumption of fattier meats in exchange for the financial benefits resulting from the sale of such cuts may have been one contributing factor in their success. The dietary trends seen in the Brumbaugh faunal assemblage seem to fit into a larger dietary pattern among German-American farmers in the nineteenth century as observed on other nineteenth-century German-American farms such as the Gibbs farm in eastern Tennessee (Mark D. Groover, The Gibbs Farmstead: Household Archaeology in an Internal Periphery, 2005). On the Gibbs farm the faunal assemblage revealed that, across all occupation periods, domestically raised animal resources accounted for at least 75% of the total faunal assemblage, which suggests a heavy reliance on farm-raised protein sources. The Gibbs farm assemblage also seems to indicate that the family’s diet was heavily reliant on pig, it being the cornerstone of their diet, supplemented to a lesser degree by cow and chicken. This trend seems to manifest on the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove farm as well, with a heavy reliance on pig and little change in diet over the span of occupation. This may suggest that the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove households were participating in a pig focused subsistence strategy that was widely employed across the Upland South region, as documented by Tanya Peres in her 2008 Historical Archaeology journal article titled Foodways, Economic Status, and the Antebellum Upland South in Central Kentucky. The scale of the smokehouse foundation (Feature 34 ) reflects the importance of meat production to the domestic economy of the farm during the mid-nineteenth century. Mid-nineteenth-century agricultural records show that the farm was grossly out-producing its neighbors in terms of swine, cattle, and sheep between 1850 and 1860. When the estate went under the management of Jacob Clare in the 1870s the production dropped off slightly, at least with regard to cattle. By the time the farm was under the tenancy of Samuel Hershey in the 1880s the raising of livestock had abated, presumably triggering the gradual abandonment of this structure. The timeline of peak meat production observed in the documentary record corresponds well with the date range of this structure’s use.
  • Beverage Consumption
    Analysis of the farming records and the glass assemblage suggests that the farm’s orchard may have been used not only for profit but for beverage self-sufficiency. The general absence of beverage-related glass in the artifact assemblage suggests that the occupants of the farm were not consuming bottled beverages such as beer and wine, which are common artifacts in the assemblages of towns and cities during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This would seem to suggest that the occupants of the farm were producing enough beverages for their own consumption. Beverages produced on-site in quantity, both for consumption and sale, would have been stored in casks. The records show that the farm possessed a productive orchard as early as 1870 (and possibly earlier—there is no orchard category in the agricultural censuses for 1850 or 1860). Under Susan Brumbaugh the farm was briefly involved in the production of wine, an activity not pursued by any of her neighbors. The production of wine on the farm, though small, shows that beverage production was a key component of the domestic economy. Wine, however, was far from a staple product. Andrew Brumbaugh’s ca. 1860 inventory lists a cider-house as one of the outbuildings on the site, suggesting that the orchard was being used to produce cider in quantity; a full cider house would have been unnecessary for general domestic consumption where a small press would suffice. As with their livestock consumption, they were meeting their domestic needs, principally through cider, and then monetizing the surplus.
  • Ceramics
    The ceramic assemblages associated with the Brumbaughs show a substantial investment in locally produced red earthenwares, which accounted for more than half of the recovered ceramic material from the site. While often utilitarian, the red earthenware tradition in the Hagerstown area provided a wide range of unique and highly decorative red earthenware items that the Brumbaughs consumed. Refined earthenwares such as pearlware and whiteware were used to a lesser extent, even into the middle and late portions of the nineteenth century. The prevalence of early-to-mid-nineteenth-century, local red earthenwares in the assemblage was most likely a reflection of personal preference as opposed to market limitations as the expanding railroad and national road networks would have made non-local goods readily available. The preference for local red earthenwares from local German-American potteries cannot be ascribed to a lack of options. More likely such ceramic consumption patterns reflected a sense of local/rural and ethnic identity that was attractive to the Brumbaughs.
  • Technology and Innovation
    The family’s self-sufficiency and ability to monetize the farm output also provided opportunities to speculate in more progressive or innovative aspects of farming. From the time of Andrew Brumbaugh until the 1870s the farm consistently listed a high value for machinery. This suggests that the Brumbaughs—Andrew and later his remarried widow, Susan—invested in new technology to maximize their yields. Census records show that the Brumbaughs and Schindels kept a stable of 10–11 horses during the 1860s and 1870s. This is far more than would be needed for general transportation purposes. In general, keeping horses is fraught with risk, and can be resource-intensive. Horses compete with cattle and sheep for pasturage and are more prone to injury and disease than cattle. Additionally, horses are a limited-function animal that produce no saleable commodity apart from labor and transport, whereas cattle or oxen can be used for meat, milk, or labor. Was the risk worth the investment, especially given the apparent cost of keeping them healthy? While some in Washington County were raising horses for racing, the value of horses to the Brumbaugh family appears to have been more pragmatic. They appear to have needed the horses for their farm labor, specifically in operating the variety of farm machinery in which they had invested. They needed the horses to power the volume of horse-drawn equipment in which they had invested: wagons, sleighs, reaper and mowers, spring tooth horse rake, an assortment of plows, wheat drills, thresher, and separator, etc. In an age before engines, it was literally horsepower that drove the engine of the farm. While the investment may have been somewhat risky, it also seems to have been rewarding, as the farm’s crop yields for wheat were often more than three times the state average. When Andrew's estate was sold, the equipment and horses went too, and seemingly with them the productivity advantages: the farm thereafter never reached the same levels of output as seen in the previous generations of the Brumbaugh tenure.

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Site Interpretations
Feature and artifact analysis was used to create a site-wide archaeological chronology for the features encountered during excavation. Site features were grouped into five broad temporal categories as shown in the figure below: late eighteenth century (1750–1800), early nineteenth century (1801–1845), mid-nineteenth century (1846–1875), late nineteenth century (1876–1900), and twentieth century (1901–2000). This grouping is based on feature date chronologies established during the artifact analysis. In some cases, a feature did not contain any diagnostic material and so could not be dated. While many such features were encountered, some of them could still be assigned a time period as they formed part of a larger feature complex that could be dated. ﷯ While these temporal categories are not strictly correlated with individual family occupations, in all cases associations can be made. The late eighteenth-century (green), early nineteenth-century (yellow), and mid-nineteenth-century (red) groupings are associated with the Brumbaugh family occupations. The late eighteenth-century grouping principally reflects Jacob Brumbaugh’s tenure, the early nineteenth-century grouping reflects Henry Brumbaugh’s tenure, and the mid-nineteenth-century group relates to the occupations of Andrew and Susan Brumbaugh. The late nineteenth-century (blue) group principally relates to the occupation of the Schindels and the dawn of the Kendle period, but the bulk of the Kendle and Grove occupations are represented by the twentieth-century (purple) group. Looking at the temporal breakdown of the features illustrated in the figure below it can be seen that those features related to late eighteenth-century occupation of the site are centered on the south side of the main house, near Feature 6, and encompass unknown outbuildings to the west. The early nineteenth-century grouping includes the large pathway complexes in the north and east yards and the stairs that lead to the basement of the northern extension of Feature 6. Additional potential outbuildings in the field to the southwest of Feature 6 suggest that the farmyard area during the early nineteenth century may have continued well south of the farmhouse. By the mid-nineteenth-century, the smokehouse (Feature 34) and its associated midden (Feature 70) were present. Late nineteenth-century features are limited to a fence line (Feature 54 complex), a privy (Feature 84), and a disturbance to one of the cobble pathways (Feature 96). The twentieth-century features principally include pipe trenches: one leading to the well, one to a water tank in the west yard, one to a septic tank inside Feature 16, and a complex of pipe trenches constituting the leach field in the fields to the south of the farmhouse. This temporal breakdown based on archaeological data provides a guide to the archaeological evidence; it shows how the built environment changed throughout the occupation history of the site, and forms a platform upon which interpretations about features and the people who made them relate to one another. The examination of features associated with the farmstead not only allowed archaeologists to understand what life was like for the people who called the farm home and to understand how the farm operated within the larger community. These broader interpretations are broken down into several categories: Click a category to learn more.
  • Throughout its long occupation, the farm’s economy seems to have been driven by a common strategy: live off what you produce, sell as much as you can, and buy as little as you can. Based on the archaeological evidence, it appears that the wealth of the farm was not spent on fine living with the frivolous consumption of food and drink. Instead, the wealth appears to have been reinvested into the farm itself in the form of machinery and infrastructure improvements. Much of the wealth the Brumbaughs amassed by this strategy was subsequently reinvested into their farm, constantly improving and embracing innovations to maximize economic output. The rewards of these endeavors appeared to be less physical and more social, with wealth gaining them local social mobility, education, and respectability beyond the reach of some of their neighbors. While not ostentatious, this investment in the property was a way of showing affluence, especially in its well-built structures such as the Swisser barn, with its decorative brick vents. The construction of income-producing structures such as a smokehouse (Feature 34) assured the continuing generation of wealth. The farm occupants also spent their money on intangibles such as education and travel. Multiple generations of Brumbaugh children were sent to school, while Henry Brumbaugh was able to leave his farm and travel to Ohio in his old age. It appears that the strategy of self-sufficiency resulted in the accumulation of enough wealth to allow the families a degree of social freedom and mobility.
  • The farm had a fairly steady emphasis on the production of cereal grains throughout its occupation, a farming strategy that seemed to remain the cornerstone of the farm’s activities. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Brumbaugh family appears to have pursued a policy of generalized agriculture that included the cultivation of a variety of cereals such as wheat, corn, barley, and rye. This was supplemented by the raising of cows and pigs and some orchard products. Jacob Brumbaugh also derived income and resources by maintaining several woodlots from which he cut and sold timber. This same type of agriculture was subsequently pursued by his son and grandsons well into the mid-nineteenth century. By this time the farm was run by Andrew Brumbaugh and it was considered an exceedingly productive Washington County farm. In his emphasis on wheat production, Andrew (and many of his neighbors) continued a local agricultural tradition with roots in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Andrew and his brother Samuel, who lived on an adjacent farm, seem to have worked collaboratively in the operation of their two farms. This strategy seems to have worked well for the family until the 1880s when the farm was divided between the descendants of Andrew and Sarah Brumbaugh with 162 3/4 acres of the original 274-acre property to be shared equally by siblings Upton Brumbaugh and Sallie Schindel and the operation of much of the farm was left to John Hershey, who rented and operated the Brumbaugh farm in exchange for a share of its harvest. According to the 1880 census, the farm’s value and formerly immense productivity seem to have declined markedly, undoubtedly as a result of its substantially reduced acreage and its transition from a family farm to a leased commercial property. While grains and hay remained important cash crops, longer-term investments such as the production of tree fruits, livestock rearing, and dairying declined markedly.
  • In contrast to cereal grain production, the raising of livestock fluctuated considerably during the mid-to late-nineteenth century, becoming a far less important contributor to the farm’s economic strategy by the Schindel period in the 1870s and remaining a lesser component thereafter. While the records demonstrate the value of swine and cattle to the farm and suggest that they were being raised in part for sale, they do not provide detail about how this practice influenced the consumption of livestock on the farm. The analysis of the meat cuts from animal bone found in archaeological deposits suggests one common thread: the almost exclusive presence of bones from the limbs and heads of animals and the conspicuous absence of animal torso cuts. The pork cuts found in the kitchen midden contexts around the house include cuts that in modern parlance are ham, ham-hock, and trotters as well as pig head. Of the beef represented, most of the meat came from the leg or shin, a cut currently known as beef shank, which is a slightly tougher cut that is best when slow cooked. In general, the fattier, meatier, and therefore more desirable, cuts along the belly and ribs of these animals are missing. The cuts of pork and beef recovered from the site are commonly smoked, which preserves them and allows them to be kept for a long period of time to provide food for domestic consumption. The bone assemblage suggests that the meatier and larger cuts found in an animal’s torso were likely harvested and sold while the somewhat less desirable cuts were kept and eaten on the farm itself, likely first having been preserved by smoking. That is not to say that they only consumed less profitable cuts, as sirloin is represented in the cattle cuts. Overall, however, the farm occupants seemed to find a way to both feed themselves amply and still successfully monetized their livestock via meat production for sale. It appears that livestock cultivation may have been one of the factors that made the Brumbaugh farm more successful than their neighbors; a willingness to give up the personal consumption of fattier meats in exchange for the financial benefits resulting from the sale of such cuts may have been one contributing factor in their success. The dietary trends seen in the Brumbaugh faunal assemblage seem to fit into a larger dietary pattern among German-American farmers in the nineteenth century as observed on other nineteenth-century German-American farms such as the Gibbs farm in eastern Tennessee (Mark D. Groover, The Gibbs Farmstead: Household Archaeology in an Internal Periphery, 2005). On the Gibbs farm the faunal assemblage revealed that, across all occupation periods, domestically raised animal resources accounted for at least 75% of the total faunal assemblage, which suggests a heavy reliance on farm-raised protein sources. The Gibbs farm assemblage also seems to indicate that the family’s diet was heavily reliant on pig, it being the cornerstone of their diet, supplemented to a lesser degree by cow and chicken. This trend seems to manifest on the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove farm as well, with a heavy reliance on pig and little change in diet over the span of occupation. This may suggest that the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove households were participating in a pig focused subsistence strategy that was widely employed across the Upland South region, as documented by Tanya Peres in her 2008 Historical Archaeology journal article titled Foodways, Economic Status, and the Antebellum Upland South in Central Kentucky. The scale of the smokehouse foundation (Feature 34 ) reflects the importance of meat production to the domestic economy of the farm during the mid-nineteenth century. Mid-nineteenth-century agricultural records show that the farm was grossly out-producing its neighbors in terms of swine, cattle, and sheep between 1850 and 1860. When the estate went under the management of Jacob Clare in the 1870s the production dropped off slightly, at least with regard to cattle. By the time the farm was under the tenancy of Samuel Hershey in the 1880s the raising of livestock had abated, presumably triggering the gradual abandonment of this structure. The timeline of peak meat production observed in the documentary record corresponds well with the date range of this structure’s use.
  • Analysis of the farming records and the glass assemblage suggests that the farm’s orchard may have been used not only for profit but for beverage self-sufficiency. The general absence of beverage-related glass in the artifact assemblage suggests that the occupants of the farm were not consuming bottled beverages such as beer and wine, which are common artifacts in the assemblages of towns and cities during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This would seem to suggest that the occupants of the farm were producing enough beverages for their own consumption. Beverages produced on-site in quantity, both for consumption and sale, would have been stored in casks. The records show that the farm possessed a productive orchard as early as 1870 (and possibly earlier—there is no orchard category in the agricultural censuses for 1850 or 1860). Under Susan Brumbaugh the farm was briefly involved in the production of wine, an activity not pursued by any of her neighbors. The production of wine on the farm, though small, shows that beverage production was a key component of the domestic economy. Wine, however, was far from a staple product. Andrew Brumbaugh’s ca. 1860 inventory lists a cider-house as one of the outbuildings on the site, suggesting that the orchard was being used to produce cider in quantity; a full cider house would have been unnecessary for general domestic consumption where a small press would suffice. As with their livestock consumption, they were meeting their domestic needs, principally through cider, and then monetizing the surplus.
  • The ceramic assemblages associated with the Brumbaughs show a substantial investment in locally produced red earthenwares, which accounted for more than half of the recovered ceramic material from the site. While often utilitarian, the red earthenware tradition in the Hagerstown area provided a wide range of unique and highly decorative red earthenware items that the Brumbaughs consumed. Refined earthenwares such as pearlware and whiteware were used to a lesser extent, even into the middle and late portions of the nineteenth century. The prevalence of early-to-mid-nineteenth-century, local red earthenwares in the assemblage was most likely a reflection of personal preference as opposed to market limitations as the expanding railroad and national road networks would have made non-local goods readily available. The preference for local red earthenwares from local German-American potteries cannot be ascribed to a lack of options. More likely such ceramic consumption patterns reflected a sense of local/rural and ethnic identity that was attractive to the Brumbaughs.
  • The family’s self-sufficiency and ability to monetize the farm output also provided opportunities to speculate in more progressive or innovative aspects of farming. From the time of Andrew Brumbaugh until the 1870s the farm consistently listed a high value for machinery. This suggests that the Brumbaughs—Andrew and later his remarried widow, Susan—invested in new technology to maximize their yields. Census records show that the Brumbaughs and Schindels kept a stable of 10–11 horses during the 1860s and 1870s. This is far more than would be needed for general transportation purposes. In general, keeping horses is fraught with risk, and can be resource-intensive. Horses compete with cattle and sheep for pasturage and are more prone to injury and disease than cattle. Additionally, horses are a limited-function animal that produce no saleable commodity apart from labor and transport, whereas cattle or oxen can be used for meat, milk, or labor. Was the risk worth the investment, especially given the apparent cost of keeping them healthy? While some in Washington County were raising horses for racing, the value of horses to the Brumbaugh family appears to have been more pragmatic. They appear to have needed the horses for their farm labor, specifically in operating the variety of farm machinery in which they had invested. They needed the horses to power the volume of horse-drawn equipment in which they had invested: wagons, sleighs, reaper and mowers, spring tooth horse rake, an assortment of plows, wheat drills, thresher, and separator, etc. In an age before engines, it was literally horsepower that drove the engine of the farm. While the investment may have been somewhat risky, it also seems to have been rewarding, as the farm’s crop yields for wheat were often more than three times the state average. When Andrew's estate was sold, the equipment and horses went too, and seemingly with them the productivity advantages: the farm thereafter never reached the same levels of output as seen in the previous generations of the Brumbaugh tenure.
Site Interpretations
Feature and artifact analysis was used to create a site-wide archaeological chronology for the features encountered during excavation. Site features were grouped into five broad temporal categories as shown in the figure below: late eighteenth century (1750–1800), early nineteenth century (1801–1845), mid-nineteenth century (1846–1875), late nineteenth century (1876–1900), and twentieth century (1901–2000). This grouping is based on feature date chronologies established during the artifact analysis. In some cases, a feature did not contain any diagnostic material and so could not be dated. While many such features were encountered, some of them could still be assigned a time period as they formed part of a larger feature complex that could be dated. ﷯ While these temporal categories are not strictly correlated with individual family occupations, in all cases associations can be made. The late eighteenth-century (green), early nineteenth-century (yellow), and mid-nineteenth-century (red) groupings are associated with the Brumbaugh family occupations. The late eighteenth-century grouping principally reflects Jacob Brumbaugh’s tenure, the early nineteenth-century grouping reflects Henry Brumbaugh’s tenure, and the mid-nineteenth-century group relates to the occupations of Andrew and Susan Brumbaugh. The late nineteenth-century (blue) group principally relates to the occupation of the Schindels and the dawn of the Kendle period, but the bulk of the Kendle and Grove occupations are represented by the twentieth-century (purple) group. Looking at the temporal breakdown of the features illustrated in the figure below it can be seen that those features related to late eighteenth-century occupation of the site are centered on the south side of the main house, near Feature 6, and encompass unknown outbuildings to the west. The early nineteenth-century grouping includes the large pathway complexes in the north and east yards and the stairs that lead to the basement of the northern extension of Feature 6. Additional potential outbuildings in the field to the southwest of Feature 6 suggest that the farmyard area during the early nineteenth century may have continued well south of the farmhouse. By the mid-nineteenth-century, the smokehouse (Feature 34) and its associated midden (Feature 70) were present. Late nineteenth-century features are limited to a fence line (Feature 54 complex), a privy (Feature 84), and a disturbance to one of the cobble pathways (Feature 96). The twentieth-century features principally include pipe trenches: one leading to the well, one to a water tank in the west yard, one to a septic tank inside Feature 16, and a complex of pipe trenches constituting the leach field in the fields to the south of the farmhouse. This temporal breakdown based on archaeological data provides a guide to the archaeological evidence; it shows how the built environment changed throughout the occupation history of the site, and forms a platform upon which interpretations about features and the people who made them relate to one another. The examination of features associated with the farmstead not only allowed archaeologists to understand what life was like for the people who called the farm home and to understand how the farm operated within the larger community. These broader interpretations are broken down into several categories: Click a category to learn more.
  • Throughout its long occupation, the farm’s economy seems to have been driven by a common strategy: live off what you produce, sell as much as you can, and buy as little as you can. Based on the archaeological evidence, it appears that the wealth of the farm was not spent on fine living with the frivolous consumption of food and drink. Instead, the wealth appears to have been reinvested into the farm itself in the form of machinery and infrastructure improvements. Much of the wealth the Brumbaughs amassed by this strategy was subsequently reinvested into their farm, constantly improving and embracing innovations to maximize economic output. The rewards of these endeavors appeared to be less physical and more social, with wealth gaining them local social mobility, education, and respectability beyond the reach of some of their neighbors. While not ostentatious, this investment in the property was a way of showing affluence, especially in its well-built structures such as the Swisser barn, with its decorative brick vents. The construction of income-producing structures such as a smokehouse (Feature 34) assured the continuing generation of wealth. The farm occupants also spent their money on intangibles such as education and travel. Multiple generations of Brumbaugh children were sent to school, while Henry Brumbaugh was able to leave his farm and travel to Ohio in his old age. It appears that the strategy of self-sufficiency resulted in the accumulation of enough wealth to allow the families a degree of social freedom and mobility.
  • The farm had a fairly steady emphasis on the production of cereal grains throughout its occupation, a farming strategy that seemed to remain the cornerstone of the farm’s activities. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Brumbaugh family appears to have pursued a policy of generalized agriculture that included the cultivation of a variety of cereals such as wheat, corn, barley, and rye. This was supplemented by the raising of cows and pigs and some orchard products. Jacob Brumbaugh also derived income and resources by maintaining several woodlots from which he cut and sold timber. This same type of agriculture was subsequently pursued by his son and grandsons well into the mid-nineteenth century. By this time the farm was run by Andrew Brumbaugh and it was considered an exceedingly productive Washington County farm. In his emphasis on wheat production, Andrew (and many of his neighbors) continued a local agricultural tradition with roots in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Andrew and his brother Samuel, who lived on an adjacent farm, seem to have worked collaboratively in the operation of their two farms. This strategy seems to have worked well for the family until the 1880s when the farm was divided between the descendants of Andrew and Sarah Brumbaugh with 162 3/4 acres of the original 274-acre property to be shared equally by siblings Upton Brumbaugh and Sallie Schindel and the operation of much of the farm was left to John Hershey, who rented and operated the Brumbaugh farm in exchange for a share of its harvest. According to the 1880 census, the farm’s value and formerly immense productivity seem to have declined markedly, undoubtedly as a result of its substantially reduced acreage and its transition from a family farm to a leased commercial property. While grains and hay remained important cash crops, longer-term investments such as the production of tree fruits, livestock rearing, and dairying declined markedly.
  • In contrast to cereal grain production, the raising of livestock fluctuated considerably during the mid-to late-nineteenth century, becoming a far less important contributor to the farm’s economic strategy by the Schindel period in the 1870s and remaining a lesser component thereafter. While the records demonstrate the value of swine and cattle to the farm and suggest that they were being raised in part for sale, they do not provide detail about how this practice influenced the consumption of livestock on the farm. The analysis of the meat cuts from animal bone found in archaeological deposits suggests one common thread: the almost exclusive presence of bones from the limbs and heads of animals and the conspicuous absence of animal torso cuts. The pork cuts found in the kitchen midden contexts around the house include cuts that in modern parlance are ham, ham-hock, and trotters as well as pig head. Of the beef represented, most of the meat came from the leg or shin, a cut currently known as beef shank, which is a slightly tougher cut that is best when slow cooked. In general, the fattier, meatier, and therefore more desirable, cuts along the belly and ribs of these animals are missing. The cuts of pork and beef recovered from the site are commonly smoked, which preserves them and allows them to be kept for a long period of time to provide food for domestic consumption. The bone assemblage suggests that the meatier and larger cuts found in an animal’s torso were likely harvested and sold while the somewhat less desirable cuts were kept and eaten on the farm itself, likely first having been preserved by smoking. That is not to say that they only consumed less profitable cuts, as sirloin is represented in the cattle cuts. Overall, however, the farm occupants seemed to find a way to both feed themselves amply and still successfully monetized their livestock via meat production for sale. It appears that livestock cultivation may have been one of the factors that made the Brumbaugh farm more successful than their neighbors; a willingness to give up the personal consumption of fattier meats in exchange for the financial benefits resulting from the sale of such cuts may have been one contributing factor in their success. The dietary trends seen in the Brumbaugh faunal assemblage seem to fit into a larger dietary pattern among German-American farmers in the nineteenth century as observed on other nineteenth-century German-American farms such as the Gibbs farm in eastern Tennessee (Mark D. Groover, The Gibbs Farmstead: Household Archaeology in an Internal Periphery, 2005). On the Gibbs farm the faunal assemblage revealed that, across all occupation periods, domestically raised animal resources accounted for at least 75% of the total faunal assemblage, which suggests a heavy reliance on farm-raised protein sources. The Gibbs farm assemblage also seems to indicate that the family’s diet was heavily reliant on pig, it being the cornerstone of their diet, supplemented to a lesser degree by cow and chicken. This trend seems to manifest on the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove farm as well, with a heavy reliance on pig and little change in diet over the span of occupation. This may suggest that the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove households were participating in a pig focused subsistence strategy that was widely employed across the Upland South region, as documented by Tanya Peres in her 2008 Historical Archaeology journal article titled Foodways, Economic Status, and the Antebellum Upland South in Central Kentucky. The scale of the smokehouse foundation (Feature 34 ) reflects the importance of meat production to the domestic economy of the farm during the mid-nineteenth century. Mid-nineteenth-century agricultural records show that the farm was grossly out-producing its neighbors in terms of swine, cattle, and sheep between 1850 and 1860. When the estate went under the management of Jacob Clare in the 1870s the production dropped off slightly, at least with regard to cattle. By the time the farm was under the tenancy of Samuel Hershey in the 1880s the raising of livestock had abated, presumably triggering the gradual abandonment of this structure. The timeline of peak meat production observed in the documentary record corresponds well with the date range of this structure’s use.
  • Analysis of the farming records and the glass assemblage suggests that the farm’s orchard may have been used not only for profit but for beverage self-sufficiency. The general absence of beverage-related glass in the artifact assemblage suggests that the occupants of the farm were not consuming bottled beverages such as beer and wine, which are common artifacts in the assemblages of towns and cities during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This would seem to suggest that the occupants of the farm were producing enough beverages for their own consumption. Beverages produced on-site in quantity, both for consumption and sale, would have been stored in casks. The records show that the farm possessed a productive orchard as early as 1870 (and possibly earlier—there is no orchard category in the agricultural censuses for 1850 or 1860). Under Susan Brumbaugh the farm was briefly involved in the production of wine, an activity not pursued by any of her neighbors. The production of wine on the farm, though small, shows that beverage production was a key component of the domestic economy. Wine, however, was far from a staple product. Andrew Brumbaugh’s ca. 1860 inventory lists a cider-house as one of the outbuildings on the site, suggesting that the orchard was being used to produce cider in quantity; a full cider house would have been unnecessary for general domestic consumption where a small press would suffice. As with their livestock consumption, they were meeting their domestic needs, principally through cider, and then monetizing the surplus.
  • The ceramic assemblages associated with the Brumbaughs show a substantial investment in locally produced red earthenwares, which accounted for more than half of the recovered ceramic material from the site. While often utilitarian, the red earthenware tradition in the Hagerstown area provided a wide range of unique and highly decorative red earthenware items that the Brumbaughs consumed. Refined earthenwares such as pearlware and whiteware were used to a lesser extent, even into the middle and late portions of the nineteenth century. The prevalence of early-to-mid-nineteenth-century, local red earthenwares in the assemblage was most likely a reflection of personal preference as opposed to market limitations as the expanding railroad and national road networks would have made non-local goods readily available. The preference for local red earthenwares from local German-American potteries cannot be ascribed to a lack of options. More likely such ceramic consumption patterns reflected a sense of local/rural and ethnic identity that was attractive to the Brumbaughs.
  • The family’s self-sufficiency and ability to monetize the farm output also provided opportunities to speculate in more progressive or innovative aspects of farming. From the time of Andrew Brumbaugh until the 1870s the farm consistently listed a high value for machinery. This suggests that the Brumbaughs—Andrew and later his remarried widow, Susan—invested in new technology to maximize their yields. Census records show that the Brumbaughs and Schindels kept a stable of 10–11 horses during the 1860s and 1870s. This is far more than would be needed for general transportation purposes. In general, keeping horses is fraught with risk, and can be resource-intensive. Horses compete with cattle and sheep for pasturage and are more prone to injury and disease than cattle. Additionally, horses are a limited-function animal that produce no saleable commodity apart from labor and transport, whereas cattle or oxen can be used for meat, milk, or labor. Was the risk worth the investment, especially given the apparent cost of keeping them healthy? While some in Washington County were raising horses for racing, the value of horses to the Brumbaugh family appears to have been more pragmatic. They appear to have needed the horses for their farm labor, specifically in operating the variety of farm machinery in which they had invested. They needed the horses to power the volume of horse-drawn equipment in which they had invested: wagons, sleighs, reaper and mowers, spring tooth horse rake, an assortment of plows, wheat drills, thresher, and separator, etc. In an age before engines, it was literally horsepower that drove the engine of the farm. While the investment may have been somewhat risky, it also seems to have been rewarding, as the farm’s crop yields for wheat were often more than three times the state average. When Andrew's estate was sold, the equipment and horses went too, and seemingly with them the productivity advantages: the farm thereafter never reached the same levels of output as seen in the previous generations of the Brumbaugh tenure.
Site Interpretations
Feature and artifact analysis was used to create a site-wide archaeological chronology for the features encountered during excavation. Site features were grouped into five broad temporal categories as shown in the figure below: late eighteenth century (1750–1800), early nineteenth century (1801–1845), mid-nineteenth century (1846–1875), late nineteenth century (1876–1900), and twentieth century (1901–2000). This grouping is based on feature date chronologies established during the artifact analysis. In some cases, a feature did not contain any diagnostic material and so could not be dated. While many such features were encountered, some of them could still be assigned a time period as they formed part of a larger feature complex that could be dated. ﷯ While these temporal categories are not strictly correlated with individual family occupations, in all cases associations can be made. The late eighteenth-century (green), early nineteenth-century (yellow), and mid-nineteenth-century (red) groupings are associated with the Brumbaugh family occupations. The late eighteenth-century grouping principally reflects Jacob Brumbaugh’s tenure, the early nineteenth-century grouping reflects Henry Brumbaugh’s tenure, and the mid-nineteenth-century group relates to the occupations of Andrew and Susan Brumbaugh. The late nineteenth-century (blue) group principally relates to the occupation of the Schindels and the dawn of the Kendle period, but the bulk of the Kendle and Grove occupations are represented by the twentieth-century (purple) group. Looking at the temporal breakdown of the features illustrated in the figure below it can be seen that those features related to late eighteenth-century occupation of the site are centered on the south side of the main house, near Feature 6, and encompass unknown outbuildings to the west. The early nineteenth-century grouping includes the large pathway complexes in the north and east yards and the stairs that lead to the basement of the northern extension of Feature 6. Additional potential outbuildings in the field to the southwest of Feature 6 suggest that the farmyard area during the early nineteenth century may have continued well south of the farmhouse. By the mid-nineteenth-century, the smokehouse (Feature 34) and its associated midden (Feature 70) were present. Late nineteenth-century features are limited to a fence line (Feature 54 complex), a privy (Feature 84), and a disturbance to one of the cobble pathways (Feature 96). The twentieth-century features principally include pipe trenches: one leading to the well, one to a water tank in the west yard, one to a septic tank inside Feature 16, and a complex of pipe trenches constituting the leach field in the fields to the south of the farmhouse. This temporal breakdown based on archaeological data provides a guide to the archaeological evidence; it shows how the built environment changed throughout the occupation history of the site, and forms a platform upon which interpretations about features and the people who made them relate to one another. The examination of features associated with the farmstead not only allowed archaeologists to understand what life was like for the people who called the farm home and to understand how the farm operated within the larger community. These broader interpretations are broken down into several categories: Click a category to learn more.
  • Throughout its long occupation, the farm’s economy seems to have been driven by a common strategy: live off what you produce, sell as much as you can, and buy as little as you can. Based on the archaeological evidence, it appears that the wealth of the farm was not spent on fine living with the frivolous consumption of food and drink. Instead, the wealth appears to have been reinvested into the farm itself in the form of machinery and infrastructure improvements. Much of the wealth the Brumbaughs amassed by this strategy was subsequently reinvested into their farm, constantly improving and embracing innovations to maximize economic output. The rewards of these endeavors appeared to be less physical and more social, with wealth gaining them local social mobility, education, and respectability beyond the reach of some of their neighbors. While not ostentatious, this investment in the property was a way of showing affluence, especially in its well-built structures such as the Swisser barn, with its decorative brick vents. The construction of income-producing structures such as a smokehouse (Feature 34) assured the continuing generation of wealth. The farm occupants also spent their money on intangibles such as education and travel. Multiple generations of Brumbaugh children were sent to school, while Henry Brumbaugh was able to leave his farm and travel to Ohio in his old age. It appears that the strategy of self-sufficiency resulted in the accumulation of enough wealth to allow the families a degree of social freedom and mobility.
  • The farm had a fairly steady emphasis on the production of cereal grains throughout its occupation, a farming strategy that seemed to remain the cornerstone of the farm’s activities. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Brumbaugh family appears to have pursued a policy of generalized agriculture that included the cultivation of a variety of cereals such as wheat, corn, barley, and rye. This was supplemented by the raising of cows and pigs and some orchard products. Jacob Brumbaugh also derived income and resources by maintaining several woodlots from which he cut and sold timber. This same type of agriculture was subsequently pursued by his son and grandsons well into the mid-nineteenth century. By this time the farm was run by Andrew Brumbaugh and it was considered an exceedingly productive Washington County farm. In his emphasis on wheat production, Andrew (and many of his neighbors) continued a local agricultural tradition with roots in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Andrew and his brother Samuel, who lived on an adjacent farm, seem to have worked collaboratively in the operation of their two farms. This strategy seems to have worked well for the family until the 1880s when the farm was divided between the descendants of Andrew and Sarah Brumbaugh with 162 3/4 acres of the original 274-acre property to be shared equally by siblings Upton Brumbaugh and Sallie Schindel and the operation of much of the farm was left to John Hershey, who rented and operated the Brumbaugh farm in exchange for a share of its harvest. According to the 1880 census, the farm’s value and formerly immense productivity seem to have declined markedly, undoubtedly as a result of its substantially reduced acreage and its transition from a family farm to a leased commercial property. While grains and hay remained important cash crops, longer-term investments such as the production of tree fruits, livestock rearing, and dairying declined markedly.
  • In contrast to cereal grain production, the raising of livestock fluctuated considerably during the mid-to late-nineteenth century, becoming a far less important contributor to the farm’s economic strategy by the Schindel period in the 1870s and remaining a lesser component thereafter. While the records demonstrate the value of swine and cattle to the farm and suggest that they were being raised in part for sale, they do not provide detail about how this practice influenced the consumption of livestock on the farm. The analysis of the meat cuts from animal bone found in archaeological deposits suggests one common thread: the almost exclusive presence of bones from the limbs and heads of animals and the conspicuous absence of animal torso cuts. The pork cuts found in the kitchen midden contexts around the house include cuts that in modern parlance are ham, ham-hock, and trotters as well as pig head. Of the beef represented, most of the meat came from the leg or shin, a cut currently known as beef shank, which is a slightly tougher cut that is best when slow cooked. In general, the fattier, meatier, and therefore more desirable, cuts along the belly and ribs of these animals are missing. The cuts of pork and beef recovered from the site are commonly smoked, which preserves them and allows them to be kept for a long period of time to provide food for domestic consumption. The bone assemblage suggests that the meatier and larger cuts found in an animal’s torso were likely harvested and sold while the somewhat less desirable cuts were kept and eaten on the farm itself, likely first having been preserved by smoking. That is not to say that they only consumed less profitable cuts, as sirloin is represented in the cattle cuts. Overall, however, the farm occupants seemed to find a way to both feed themselves amply and still successfully monetized their livestock via meat production for sale. It appears that livestock cultivation may have been one of the factors that made the Brumbaugh farm more successful than their neighbors; a willingness to give up the personal consumption of fattier meats in exchange for the financial benefits resulting from the sale of such cuts may have been one contributing factor in their success. The dietary trends seen in the Brumbaugh faunal assemblage seem to fit into a larger dietary pattern among German-American farmers in the nineteenth century as observed on other nineteenth-century German-American farms such as the Gibbs farm in eastern Tennessee (Mark D. Groover, The Gibbs Farmstead: Household Archaeology in an Internal Periphery, 2005). On the Gibbs farm the faunal assemblage revealed that, across all occupation periods, domestically raised animal resources accounted for at least 75% of the total faunal assemblage, which suggests a heavy reliance on farm-raised protein sources. The Gibbs farm assemblage also seems to indicate that the family’s diet was heavily reliant on pig, it being the cornerstone of their diet, supplemented to a lesser degree by cow and chicken. This trend seems to manifest on the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove farm as well, with a heavy reliance on pig and little change in diet over the span of occupation. This may suggest that the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove households were participating in a pig focused subsistence strategy that was widely employed across the Upland South region, as documented by Tanya Peres in her 2008 Historical Archaeology journal article titled Foodways, Economic Status, and the Antebellum Upland South in Central Kentucky. The scale of the smokehouse foundation (Feature 34 ) reflects the importance of meat production to the domestic economy of the farm during the mid-nineteenth century. Mid-nineteenth-century agricultural records show that the farm was grossly out-producing its neighbors in terms of swine, cattle, and sheep between 1850 and 1860. When the estate went under the management of Jacob Clare in the 1870s the production dropped off slightly, at least with regard to cattle. By the time the farm was under the tenancy of Samuel Hershey in the 1880s the raising of livestock had abated, presumably triggering the gradual abandonment of this structure. The timeline of peak meat production observed in the documentary record corresponds well with the date range of this structure’s use.
  • Analysis of the farming records and the glass assemblage suggests that the farm’s orchard may have been used not only for profit but for beverage self-sufficiency. The general absence of beverage-related glass in the artifact assemblage suggests that the occupants of the farm were not consuming bottled beverages such as beer and wine, which are common artifacts in the assemblages of towns and cities during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This would seem to suggest that the occupants of the farm were producing enough beverages for their own consumption. Beverages produced on-site in quantity, both for consumption and sale, would have been stored in casks. The records show that the farm possessed a productive orchard as early as 1870 (and possibly earlier—there is no orchard category in the agricultural censuses for 1850 or 1860). Under Susan Brumbaugh the farm was briefly involved in the production of wine, an activity not pursued by any of her neighbors. The production of wine on the farm, though small, shows that beverage production was a key component of the domestic economy. Wine, however, was far from a staple product. Andrew Brumbaugh’s ca. 1860 inventory lists a cider-house as one of the outbuildings on the site, suggesting that the orchard was being used to produce cider in quantity; a full cider house would have been unnecessary for general domestic consumption where a small press would suffice. As with their livestock consumption, they were meeting their domestic needs, principally through cider, and then monetizing the surplus.
  • The ceramic assemblages associated with the Brumbaughs show a substantial investment in locally produced red earthenwares, which accounted for more than half of the recovered ceramic material from the site. While often utilitarian, the red earthenware tradition in the Hagerstown area provided a wide range of unique and highly decorative red earthenware items that the Brumbaughs consumed. Refined earthenwares such as pearlware and whiteware were used to a lesser extent, even into the middle and late portions of the nineteenth century. The prevalence of early-to-mid-nineteenth-century, local red earthenwares in the assemblage was most likely a reflection of personal preference as opposed to market limitations as the expanding railroad and national road networks would have made non-local goods readily available. The preference for local red earthenwares from local German-American potteries cannot be ascribed to a lack of options. More likely such ceramic consumption patterns reflected a sense of local/rural and ethnic identity that was attractive to the Brumbaughs.
  • The family’s self-sufficiency and ability to monetize the farm output also provided opportunities to speculate in more progressive or innovative aspects of farming. From the time of Andrew Brumbaugh until the 1870s the farm consistently listed a high value for machinery. This suggests that the Brumbaughs—Andrew and later his remarried widow, Susan—invested in new technology to maximize their yields. Census records show that the Brumbaughs and Schindels kept a stable of 10–11 horses during the 1860s and 1870s. This is far more than would be needed for general transportation purposes. In general, keeping horses is fraught with risk, and can be resource-intensive. Horses compete with cattle and sheep for pasturage and are more prone to injury and disease than cattle. Additionally, horses are a limited-function animal that produce no saleable commodity apart from labor and transport, whereas cattle or oxen can be used for meat, milk, or labor. Was the risk worth the investment, especially given the apparent cost of keeping them healthy? While some in Washington County were raising horses for racing, the value of horses to the Brumbaugh family appears to have been more pragmatic. They appear to have needed the horses for their farm labor, specifically in operating the variety of farm machinery in which they had invested. They needed the horses to power the volume of horse-drawn equipment in which they had invested: wagons, sleighs, reaper and mowers, spring tooth horse rake, an assortment of plows, wheat drills, thresher, and separator, etc. In an age before engines, it was literally horsepower that drove the engine of the farm. While the investment may have been somewhat risky, it also seems to have been rewarding, as the farm’s crop yields for wheat were often more than three times the state average. When Andrew's estate was sold, the equipment and horses went too, and seemingly with them the productivity advantages: the farm thereafter never reached the same levels of output as seen in the previous generations of the Brumbaugh tenure.
Site Interpretations
Feature and artifact analysis was used to create a site-wide archaeological chronology for the features encountered during excavation. Site features were grouped into five broad temporal categories as shown in the figure below: late eighteenth century (1750–1800), early nineteenth century (1801–1845), mid-nineteenth century (1846–1875), late nineteenth century (1876–1900), and twentieth century (1901–2000). This grouping is based on feature date chronologies established during the artifact analysis. In some cases, a feature did not contain any diagnostic material and so could not be dated. While many such features were encountered, some of them could still be assigned a time period as they formed part of a larger feature complex that could be dated. ﷯ While these temporal categories are not strictly correlated with individual family occupations, in all cases associations can be made. The late eighteenth-century (green), early nineteenth-century (yellow), and mid-nineteenth-century (red) groupings are associated with the Brumbaugh family occupations. The late eighteenth-century grouping principally reflects Jacob Brumbaugh’s tenure, the early nineteenth-century grouping reflects Henry Brumbaugh’s tenure, and the mid-nineteenth-century group relates to the occupations of Andrew and Susan Brumbaugh. The late nineteenth-century (blue) group principally relates to the occupation of the Schindels and the dawn of the Kendle period, but the bulk of the Kendle and Grove occupations are represented by the twentieth-century (purple) group. Looking at the temporal breakdown of the features illustrated in the figure below it can be seen that those features related to late eighteenth-century occupation of the site are centered on the south side of the main house, near Feature 6, and encompass unknown outbuildings to the west. The early nineteenth-century grouping includes the large pathway complexes in the north and east yards and the stairs that lead to the basement of the northern extension of Feature 6. Additional potential outbuildings in the field to the southwest of Feature 6 suggest that the farmyard area during the early nineteenth century may have continued well south of the farmhouse. By the mid-nineteenth-century, the smokehouse (Feature 34) and its associated midden (Feature 70) were present. Late nineteenth-century features are limited to a fence line (Feature 54 complex), a privy (Feature 84), and a disturbance to one of the cobble pathways (Feature 96). The twentieth-century features principally include pipe trenches: one leading to the well, one to a water tank in the west yard, one to a septic tank inside Feature 16, and a complex of pipe trenches constituting the leach field in the fields to the south of the farmhouse. This temporal breakdown based on archaeological data provides a guide to the archaeological evidence; it shows how the built environment changed throughout the occupation history of the site, and forms a platform upon which interpretations about features and the people who made them relate to one another. The examination of features associated with the farmstead not only allowed archaeologists to understand what life was like for the people who called the farm home and to understand how the farm operated within the larger community. These broader interpretations are broken down into several categories: Click a category to learn more.
  • Throughout its long occupation, the farm’s economy seems to have been driven by a common strategy: live off what you produce, sell as much as you can, and buy as little as you can. Based on the archaeological evidence, it appears that the wealth of the farm was not spent on fine living with the frivolous consumption of food and drink. Instead, the wealth appears to have been reinvested into the farm itself in the form of machinery and infrastructure improvements. Much of the wealth the Brumbaughs amassed by this strategy was subsequently reinvested into their farm, constantly improving and embracing innovations to maximize economic output. The rewards of these endeavors appeared to be less physical and more social, with wealth gaining them local social mobility, education, and respectability beyond the reach of some of their neighbors. While not ostentatious, this investment in the property was a way of showing affluence, especially in its well-built structures such as the Swisser barn, with its decorative brick vents. The construction of income-producing structures such as a smokehouse (Feature 34) assured the continuing generation of wealth. The farm occupants also spent their money on intangibles such as education and travel. Multiple generations of Brumbaugh children were sent to school, while Henry Brumbaugh was able to leave his farm and travel to Ohio in his old age. It appears that the strategy of self-sufficiency resulted in the accumulation of enough wealth to allow the families a degree of social freedom and mobility.
  • The farm had a fairly steady emphasis on the production of cereal grains throughout its occupation, a farming strategy that seemed to remain the cornerstone of the farm’s activities. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Brumbaugh family appears to have pursued a policy of generalized agriculture that included the cultivation of a variety of cereals such as wheat, corn, barley, and rye. This was supplemented by the raising of cows and pigs and some orchard products. Jacob Brumbaugh also derived income and resources by maintaining several woodlots from which he cut and sold timber. This same type of agriculture was subsequently pursued by his son and grandsons well into the mid-nineteenth century. By this time the farm was run by Andrew Brumbaugh and it was considered an exceedingly productive Washington County farm. In his emphasis on wheat production, Andrew (and many of his neighbors) continued a local agricultural tradition with roots in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Andrew and his brother Samuel, who lived on an adjacent farm, seem to have worked collaboratively in the operation of their two farms. This strategy seems to have worked well for the family until the 1880s when the farm was divided between the descendants of Andrew and Sarah Brumbaugh with 162 3/4 acres of the original 274-acre property to be shared equally by siblings Upton Brumbaugh and Sallie Schindel and the operation of much of the farm was left to John Hershey, who rented and operated the Brumbaugh farm in exchange for a share of its harvest. According to the 1880 census, the farm’s value and formerly immense productivity seem to have declined markedly, undoubtedly as a result of its substantially reduced acreage and its transition from a family farm to a leased commercial property. While grains and hay remained important cash crops, longer-term investments such as the production of tree fruits, livestock rearing, and dairying declined markedly.
  • In contrast to cereal grain production, the raising of livestock fluctuated considerably during the mid-to late-nineteenth century, becoming a far less important contributor to the farm’s economic strategy by the Schindel period in the 1870s and remaining a lesser component thereafter. While the records demonstrate the value of swine and cattle to the farm and suggest that they were being raised in part for sale, they do not provide detail about how this practice influenced the consumption of livestock on the farm. The analysis of the meat cuts from animal bone found in archaeological deposits suggests one common thread: the almost exclusive presence of bones from the limbs and heads of animals and the conspicuous absence of animal torso cuts. The pork cuts found in the kitchen midden contexts around the house include cuts that in modern parlance are ham, ham-hock, and trotters as well as pig head. Of the beef represented, most of the meat came from the leg or shin, a cut currently known as beef shank, which is a slightly tougher cut that is best when slow cooked. In general, the fattier, meatier, and therefore more desirable, cuts along the belly and ribs of these animals are missing. The cuts of pork and beef recovered from the site are commonly smoked, which preserves them and allows them to be kept for a long period of time to provide food for domestic consumption. The bone assemblage suggests that the meatier and larger cuts found in an animal’s torso were likely harvested and sold while the somewhat less desirable cuts were kept and eaten on the farm itself, likely first having been preserved by smoking. That is not to say that they only consumed less profitable cuts, as sirloin is represented in the cattle cuts. Overall, however, the farm occupants seemed to find a way to both feed themselves amply and still successfully monetized their livestock via meat production for sale. It appears that livestock cultivation may have been one of the factors that made the Brumbaugh farm more successful than their neighbors; a willingness to give up the personal consumption of fattier meats in exchange for the financial benefits resulting from the sale of such cuts may have been one contributing factor in their success. The dietary trends seen in the Brumbaugh faunal assemblage seem to fit into a larger dietary pattern among German-American farmers in the nineteenth century as observed on other nineteenth-century German-American farms such as the Gibbs farm in eastern Tennessee (Mark D. Groover, The Gibbs Farmstead: Household Archaeology in an Internal Periphery, 2005). On the Gibbs farm the faunal assemblage revealed that, across all occupation periods, domestically raised animal resources accounted for at least 75% of the total faunal assemblage, which suggests a heavy reliance on farm-raised protein sources. The Gibbs farm assemblage also seems to indicate that the family’s diet was heavily reliant on pig, it being the cornerstone of their diet, supplemented to a lesser degree by cow and chicken. This trend seems to manifest on the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove farm as well, with a heavy reliance on pig and little change in diet over the span of occupation. This may suggest that the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove households were participating in a pig focused subsistence strategy that was widely employed across the Upland South region, as documented by Tanya Peres in her 2008 Historical Archaeology journal article titled Foodways, Economic Status, and the Antebellum Upland South in Central Kentucky. The scale of the smokehouse foundation (Feature 34 ) reflects the importance of meat production to the domestic economy of the farm during the mid-nineteenth century. Mid-nineteenth-century agricultural records show that the farm was grossly out-producing its neighbors in terms of swine, cattle, and sheep between 1850 and 1860. When the estate went under the management of Jacob Clare in the 1870s the production dropped off slightly, at least with regard to cattle. By the time the farm was under the tenancy of Samuel Hershey in the 1880s the raising of livestock had abated, presumably triggering the gradual abandonment of this structure. The timeline of peak meat production observed in the documentary record corresponds well with the date range of this structure’s use.
  • Analysis of the farming records and the glass assemblage suggests that the farm’s orchard may have been used not only for profit but for beverage self-sufficiency. The general absence of beverage-related glass in the artifact assemblage suggests that the occupants of the farm were not consuming bottled beverages such as beer and wine, which are common artifacts in the assemblages of towns and cities during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This would seem to suggest that the occupants of the farm were producing enough beverages for their own consumption. Beverages produced on-site in quantity, both for consumption and sale, would have been stored in casks. The records show that the farm possessed a productive orchard as early as 1870 (and possibly earlier—there is no orchard category in the agricultural censuses for 1850 or 1860). Under Susan Brumbaugh the farm was briefly involved in the production of wine, an activity not pursued by any of her neighbors. The production of wine on the farm, though small, shows that beverage production was a key component of the domestic economy. Wine, however, was far from a staple product. Andrew Brumbaugh’s ca. 1860 inventory lists a cider-house as one of the outbuildings on the site, suggesting that the orchard was being used to produce cider in quantity; a full cider house would have been unnecessary for general domestic consumption where a small press would suffice. As with their livestock consumption, they were meeting their domestic needs, principally through cider, and then monetizing the surplus.
  • The ceramic assemblages associated with the Brumbaughs show a substantial investment in locally produced red earthenwares, which accounted for more than half of the recovered ceramic material from the site. While often utilitarian, the red earthenware tradition in the Hagerstown area provided a wide range of unique and highly decorative red earthenware items that the Brumbaughs consumed. Refined earthenwares such as pearlware and whiteware were used to a lesser extent, even into the middle and late portions of the nineteenth century. The prevalence of early-to-mid-nineteenth-century, local red earthenwares in the assemblage was most likely a reflection of personal preference as opposed to market limitations as the expanding railroad and national road networks would have made non-local goods readily available. The preference for local red earthenwares from local German-American potteries cannot be ascribed to a lack of options. More likely such ceramic consumption patterns reflected a sense of local/rural and ethnic identity that was attractive to the Brumbaughs.
  • The family’s self-sufficiency and ability to monetize the farm output also provided opportunities to speculate in more progressive or innovative aspects of farming. From the time of Andrew Brumbaugh until the 1870s the farm consistently listed a high value for machinery. This suggests that the Brumbaughs—Andrew and later his remarried widow, Susan—invested in new technology to maximize their yields. Census records show that the Brumbaughs and Schindels kept a stable of 10–11 horses during the 1860s and 1870s. This is far more than would be needed for general transportation purposes. In general, keeping horses is fraught with risk, and can be resource-intensive. Horses compete with cattle and sheep for pasturage and are more prone to injury and disease than cattle. Additionally, horses are a limited-function animal that produce no saleable commodity apart from labor and transport, whereas cattle or oxen can be used for meat, milk, or labor. Was the risk worth the investment, especially given the apparent cost of keeping them healthy? While some in Washington County were raising horses for racing, the value of horses to the Brumbaugh family appears to have been more pragmatic. They appear to have needed the horses for their farm labor, specifically in operating the variety of farm machinery in which they had invested. They needed the horses to power the volume of horse-drawn equipment in which they had invested: wagons, sleighs, reaper and mowers, spring tooth horse rake, an assortment of plows, wheat drills, thresher, and separator, etc. In an age before engines, it was literally horsepower that drove the engine of the farm. While the investment may have been somewhat risky, it also seems to have been rewarding, as the farm’s crop yields for wheat were often more than three times the state average. When Andrew's estate was sold, the equipment and horses went too, and seemingly with them the productivity advantages: the farm thereafter never reached the same levels of output as seen in the previous generations of the Brumbaugh tenure.
Site Interpretations
Feature and artifact analysis was used to create a site-wide archaeological chronology for the features encountered during excavation. Site features were grouped into five broad temporal categories as shown in the figure below: late eighteenth century (1750–1800), early nineteenth century (1801–1845), mid-nineteenth century (1846–1875), late nineteenth century (1876–1900), and twentieth century (1901–2000). This grouping is based on feature date chronologies established during the artifact analysis. In some cases, a feature did not contain any diagnostic material and so could not be dated. While many such features were encountered, some of them could still be assigned a time period as they formed part of a larger feature complex that could be dated. ﷯ While these temporal categories are not strictly correlated with individual family occupations, in all cases associations can be made. The late eighteenth-century (green), early nineteenth-century (yellow), and mid-nineteenth-century (red) groupings are associated with the Brumbaugh family occupations. The late eighteenth-century grouping principally reflects Jacob Brumbaugh’s tenure, the early nineteenth-century grouping reflects Henry Brumbaugh’s tenure, and the mid-nineteenth-century group relates to the occupations of Andrew and Susan Brumbaugh. The late nineteenth-century (blue) group principally relates to the occupation of the Schindels and the dawn of the Kendle period, but the bulk of the Kendle and Grove occupations are represented by the twentieth-century (purple) group. Looking at the temporal breakdown of the features illustrated in the figure below it can be seen that those features related to late eighteenth-century occupation of the site are centered on the south side of the main house, near Feature 6, and encompass unknown outbuildings to the west. The early nineteenth-century grouping includes the large pathway complexes in the north and east yards and the stairs that lead to the basement of the northern extension of Feature 6. Additional potential outbuildings in the field to the southwest of Feature 6 suggest that the farmyard area during the early nineteenth century may have continued well south of the farmhouse. By the mid-nineteenth-century, the smokehouse (Feature 34) and its associated midden (Feature 70) were present. Late nineteenth-century features are limited to a fence line (Feature 54 complex), a privy (Feature 84), and a disturbance to one of the cobble pathways (Feature 96). The twentieth-century features principally include pipe trenches: one leading to the well, one to a water tank in the west yard, one to a septic tank inside Feature 16, and a complex of pipe trenches constituting the leach field in the fields to the south of the farmhouse. This temporal breakdown based on archaeological data provides a guide to the archaeological evidence; it shows how the built environment changed throughout the occupation history of the site, and forms a platform upon which interpretations about features and the people who made them relate to one another. The examination of features associated with the farmstead not only allowed archaeologists to understand what life was like for the people who called the farm home and to understand how the farm operated within the larger community. These broader interpretations are broken down into several categories: Click a category to learn more.
  • Throughout its long occupation, the farm’s economy seems to have been driven by a common strategy: live off what you produce, sell as much as you can, and buy as little as you can. Based on the archaeological evidence, it appears that the wealth of the farm was not spent on fine living with the frivolous consumption of food and drink. Instead, the wealth appears to have been reinvested into the farm itself in the form of machinery and infrastructure improvements. Much of the wealth the Brumbaughs amassed by this strategy was subsequently reinvested into their farm, constantly improving and embracing innovations to maximize economic output. The rewards of these endeavors appeared to be less physical and more social, with wealth gaining them local social mobility, education, and respectability beyond the reach of some of their neighbors. While not ostentatious, this investment in the property was a way of showing affluence, especially in its well-built structures such as the Swisser barn, with its decorative brick vents. The construction of income-producing structures such as a smokehouse (Feature 34) assured the continuing generation of wealth. The farm occupants also spent their money on intangibles such as education and travel. Multiple generations of Brumbaugh children were sent to school, while Henry Brumbaugh was able to leave his farm and travel to Ohio in his old age. It appears that the strategy of self-sufficiency resulted in the accumulation of enough wealth to allow the families a degree of social freedom and mobility.
  • The farm had a fairly steady emphasis on the production of cereal grains throughout its occupation, a farming strategy that seemed to remain the cornerstone of the farm’s activities. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Brumbaugh family appears to have pursued a policy of generalized agriculture that included the cultivation of a variety of cereals such as wheat, corn, barley, and rye. This was supplemented by the raising of cows and pigs and some orchard products. Jacob Brumbaugh also derived income and resources by maintaining several woodlots from which he cut and sold timber. This same type of agriculture was subsequently pursued by his son and grandsons well into the mid-nineteenth century. By this time the farm was run by Andrew Brumbaugh and it was considered an exceedingly productive Washington County farm. In his emphasis on wheat production, Andrew (and many of his neighbors) continued a local agricultural tradition with roots in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Andrew and his brother Samuel, who lived on an adjacent farm, seem to have worked collaboratively in the operation of their two farms. This strategy seems to have worked well for the family until the 1880s when the farm was divided between the descendants of Andrew and Sarah Brumbaugh with 162 3/4 acres of the original 274-acre property to be shared equally by siblings Upton Brumbaugh and Sallie Schindel and the operation of much of the farm was left to John Hershey, who rented and operated the Brumbaugh farm in exchange for a share of its harvest. According to the 1880 census, the farm’s value and formerly immense productivity seem to have declined markedly, undoubtedly as a result of its substantially reduced acreage and its transition from a family farm to a leased commercial property. While grains and hay remained important cash crops, longer-term investments such as the production of tree fruits, livestock rearing, and dairying declined markedly.
  • In contrast to cereal grain production, the raising of livestock fluctuated considerably during the mid-to late-nineteenth century, becoming a far less important contributor to the farm’s economic strategy by the Schindel period in the 1870s and remaining a lesser component thereafter. While the records demonstrate the value of swine and cattle to the farm and suggest that they were being raised in part for sale, they do not provide detail about how this practice influenced the consumption of livestock on the farm. The analysis of the meat cuts from animal bone found in archaeological deposits suggests one common thread: the almost exclusive presence of bones from the limbs and heads of animals and the conspicuous absence of animal torso cuts. The pork cuts found in the kitchen midden contexts around the house include cuts that in modern parlance are ham, ham-hock, and trotters as well as pig head. Of the beef represented, most of the meat came from the leg or shin, a cut currently known as beef shank, which is a slightly tougher cut that is best when slow cooked. In general, the fattier, meatier, and therefore more desirable, cuts along the belly and ribs of these animals are missing. The cuts of pork and beef recovered from the site are commonly smoked, which preserves them and allows them to be kept for a long period of time to provide food for domestic consumption. The bone assemblage suggests that the meatier and larger cuts found in an animal’s torso were likely harvested and sold while the somewhat less desirable cuts were kept and eaten on the farm itself, likely first having been preserved by smoking. That is not to say that they only consumed less profitable cuts, as sirloin is represented in the cattle cuts. Overall, however, the farm occupants seemed to find a way to both feed themselves amply and still successfully monetized their livestock via meat production for sale. It appears that livestock cultivation may have been one of the factors that made the Brumbaugh farm more successful than their neighbors; a willingness to give up the personal consumption of fattier meats in exchange for the financial benefits resulting from the sale of such cuts may have been one contributing factor in their success. The dietary trends seen in the Brumbaugh faunal assemblage seem to fit into a larger dietary pattern among German-American farmers in the nineteenth century as observed on other nineteenth-century German-American farms such as the Gibbs farm in eastern Tennessee (Mark D. Groover, The Gibbs Farmstead: Household Archaeology in an Internal Periphery, 2005). On the Gibbs farm the faunal assemblage revealed that, across all occupation periods, domestically raised animal resources accounted for at least 75% of the total faunal assemblage, which suggests a heavy reliance on farm-raised protein sources. The Gibbs farm assemblage also seems to indicate that the family’s diet was heavily reliant on pig, it being the cornerstone of their diet, supplemented to a lesser degree by cow and chicken. This trend seems to manifest on the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove farm as well, with a heavy reliance on pig and little change in diet over the span of occupation. This may suggest that the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove households were participating in a pig focused subsistence strategy that was widely employed across the Upland South region, as documented by Tanya Peres in her 2008 Historical Archaeology journal article titled Foodways, Economic Status, and the Antebellum Upland South in Central Kentucky. The scale of the smokehouse foundation (Feature 34 ) reflects the importance of meat production to the domestic economy of the farm during the mid-nineteenth century. Mid-nineteenth-century agricultural records show that the farm was grossly out-producing its neighbors in terms of swine, cattle, and sheep between 1850 and 1860. When the estate went under the management of Jacob Clare in the 1870s the production dropped off slightly, at least with regard to cattle. By the time the farm was under the tenancy of Samuel Hershey in the 1880s the raising of livestock had abated, presumably triggering the gradual abandonment of this structure. The timeline of peak meat production observed in the documentary record corresponds well with the date range of this structure’s use.
  • Analysis of the farming records and the glass assemblage suggests that the farm’s orchard may have been used not only for profit but for beverage self-sufficiency. The general absence of beverage-related glass in the artifact assemblage suggests that the occupants of the farm were not consuming bottled beverages such as beer and wine, which are common artifacts in the assemblages of towns and cities during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This would seem to suggest that the occupants of the farm were producing enough beverages for their own consumption. Beverages produced on-site in quantity, both for consumption and sale, would have been stored in casks. The records show that the farm possessed a productive orchard as early as 1870 (and possibly earlier—there is no orchard category in the agricultural censuses for 1850 or 1860). Under Susan Brumbaugh the farm was briefly involved in the production of wine, an activity not pursued by any of her neighbors. The production of wine on the farm, though small, shows that beverage production was a key component of the domestic economy. Wine, however, was far from a staple product. Andrew Brumbaugh’s ca. 1860 inventory lists a cider-house as one of the outbuildings on the site, suggesting that the orchard was being used to produce cider in quantity; a full cider house would have been unnecessary for general domestic consumption where a small press would suffice. As with their livestock consumption, they were meeting their domestic needs, principally through cider, and then monetizing the surplus.
  • The ceramic assemblages associated with the Brumbaughs show a substantial investment in locally produced red earthenwares, which accounted for more than half of the recovered ceramic material from the site. While often utilitarian, the red earthenware tradition in the Hagerstown area provided a wide range of unique and highly decorative red earthenware items that the Brumbaughs consumed. Refined earthenwares such as pearlware and whiteware were used to a lesser extent, even into the middle and late portions of the nineteenth century. The prevalence of early-to-mid-nineteenth-century, local red earthenwares in the assemblage was most likely a reflection of personal preference as opposed to market limitations as the expanding railroad and national road networks would have made non-local goods readily available. The preference for local red earthenwares from local German-American potteries cannot be ascribed to a lack of options. More likely such ceramic consumption patterns reflected a sense of local/rural and ethnic identity that was attractive to the Brumbaughs.
  • The family’s self-sufficiency and ability to monetize the farm output also provided opportunities to speculate in more progressive or innovative aspects of farming. From the time of Andrew Brumbaugh until the 1870s the farm consistently listed a high value for machinery. This suggests that the Brumbaughs—Andrew and later his remarried widow, Susan—invested in new technology to maximize their yields. Census records show that the Brumbaughs and Schindels kept a stable of 10–11 horses during the 1860s and 1870s. This is far more than would be needed for general transportation purposes. In general, keeping horses is fraught with risk, and can be resource-intensive. Horses compete with cattle and sheep for pasturage and are more prone to injury and disease than cattle. Additionally, horses are a limited-function animal that produce no saleable commodity apart from labor and transport, whereas cattle or oxen can be used for meat, milk, or labor. Was the risk worth the investment, especially given the apparent cost of keeping them healthy? While some in Washington County were raising horses for racing, the value of horses to the Brumbaugh family appears to have been more pragmatic. They appear to have needed the horses for their farm labor, specifically in operating the variety of farm machinery in which they had invested. They needed the horses to power the volume of horse-drawn equipment in which they had invested: wagons, sleighs, reaper and mowers, spring tooth horse rake, an assortment of plows, wheat drills, thresher, and separator, etc. In an age before engines, it was literally horsepower that drove the engine of the farm. While the investment may have been somewhat risky, it also seems to have been rewarding, as the farm’s crop yields for wheat were often more than three times the state average. When Andrew's estate was sold, the equipment and horses went too, and seemingly with them the productivity advantages: the farm thereafter never reached the same levels of output as seen in the previous generations of the Brumbaugh tenure.
Site Interpretations
Feature and artifact analysis was used to create a site-wide archaeological chronology for the features encountered during excavation. Site features were grouped into five broad temporal categories as shown in the figure below: late eighteenth century (1750–1800), early nineteenth century (1801–1845), mid-nineteenth century (1846–1875), late nineteenth century (1876–1900), and twentieth century (1901–2000). This grouping is based on feature date chronologies established during the artifact analysis. In some cases, a feature did not contain any diagnostic material and so could not be dated. While many such features were encountered, some of them could still be assigned a time period as they formed part of a larger feature complex that could be dated. ﷯ While these temporal categories are not strictly correlated with individual family occupations, in all cases associations can be made. The late eighteenth-century (green), early nineteenth-century (yellow), and mid-nineteenth-century (red) groupings are associated with the Brumbaugh family occupations. The late eighteenth-century grouping principally reflects Jacob Brumbaugh’s tenure, the early nineteenth-century grouping reflects Henry Brumbaugh’s tenure, and the mid-nineteenth-century group relates to the occupations of Andrew and Susan Brumbaugh. The late nineteenth-century (blue) group principally relates to the occupation of the Schindels and the dawn of the Kendle period, but the bulk of the Kendle and Grove occupations are represented by the twentieth-century (purple) group. Looking at the temporal breakdown of the features illustrated in the figure below it can be seen that those features related to late eighteenth-century occupation of the site are centered on the south side of the main house, near Feature 6, and encompass unknown outbuildings to the west. The early nineteenth-century grouping includes the large pathway complexes in the north and east yards and the stairs that lead to the basement of the northern extension of Feature 6. Additional potential outbuildings in the field to the southwest of Feature 6 suggest that the farmyard area during the early nineteenth century may have continued well south of the farmhouse. By the mid-nineteenth-century, the smokehouse (Feature 34) and its associated midden (Feature 70) were present. Late nineteenth-century features are limited to a fence line (Feature 54 complex), a privy (Feature 84), and a disturbance to one of the cobble pathways (Feature 96). The twentieth-century features principally include pipe trenches: one leading to the well, one to a water tank in the west yard, one to a septic tank inside Feature 16, and a complex of pipe trenches constituting the leach field in the fields to the south of the farmhouse. This temporal breakdown based on archaeological data provides a guide to the archaeological evidence; it shows how the built environment changed throughout the occupation history of the site, and forms a platform upon which interpretations about features and the people who made them relate to one another. The examination of features associated with the farmstead not only allowed archaeologists to understand what life was like for the people who called the farm home and to understand how the farm operated within the larger community. These broader interpretations are broken down into several categories: Click a category to learn more.
  • Throughout its long occupation, the farm’s economy seems to have been driven by a common strategy: live off what you produce, sell as much as you can, and buy as little as you can. Based on the archaeological evidence, it appears that the wealth of the farm was not spent on fine living with the frivolous consumption of food and drink. Instead, the wealth appears to have been reinvested into the farm itself in the form of machinery and infrastructure improvements. Much of the wealth the Brumbaughs amassed by this strategy was subsequently reinvested into their farm, constantly improving and embracing innovations to maximize economic output. The rewards of these endeavors appeared to be less physical and more social, with wealth gaining them local social mobility, education, and respectability beyond the reach of some of their neighbors. While not ostentatious, this investment in the property was a way of showing affluence, especially in its well-built structures such as the Swisser barn, with its decorative brick vents. The construction of income-producing structures such as a smokehouse (Feature 34) assured the continuing generation of wealth. The farm occupants also spent their money on intangibles such as education and travel. Multiple generations of Brumbaugh children were sent to school, while Henry Brumbaugh was able to leave his farm and travel to Ohio in his old age. It appears that the strategy of self-sufficiency resulted in the accumulation of enough wealth to allow the families a degree of social freedom and mobility.
  • The farm had a fairly steady emphasis on the production of cereal grains throughout its occupation, a farming strategy that seemed to remain the cornerstone of the farm’s activities. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Brumbaugh family appears to have pursued a policy of generalized agriculture that included the cultivation of a variety of cereals such as wheat, corn, barley, and rye. This was supplemented by the raising of cows and pigs and some orchard products. Jacob Brumbaugh also derived income and resources by maintaining several woodlots from which he cut and sold timber. This same type of agriculture was subsequently pursued by his son and grandsons well into the mid-nineteenth century. By this time the farm was run by Andrew Brumbaugh and it was considered an exceedingly productive Washington County farm. In his emphasis on wheat production, Andrew (and many of his neighbors) continued a local agricultural tradition with roots in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Andrew and his brother Samuel, who lived on an adjacent farm, seem to have worked collaboratively in the operation of their two farms. This strategy seems to have worked well for the family until the 1880s when the farm was divided between the descendants of Andrew and Sarah Brumbaugh with 162 3/4 acres of the original 274-acre property to be shared equally by siblings Upton Brumbaugh and Sallie Schindel and the operation of much of the farm was left to John Hershey, who rented and operated the Brumbaugh farm in exchange for a share of its harvest. According to the 1880 census, the farm’s value and formerly immense productivity seem to have declined markedly, undoubtedly as a result of its substantially reduced acreage and its transition from a family farm to a leased commercial property. While grains and hay remained important cash crops, longer-term investments such as the production of tree fruits, livestock rearing, and dairying declined markedly.
  • In contrast to cereal grain production, the raising of livestock fluctuated considerably during the mid-to late-nineteenth century, becoming a far less important contributor to the farm’s economic strategy by the Schindel period in the 1870s and remaining a lesser component thereafter. While the records demonstrate the value of swine and cattle to the farm and suggest that they were being raised in part for sale, they do not provide detail about how this practice influenced the consumption of livestock on the farm. The analysis of the meat cuts from animal bone found in archaeological deposits suggests one common thread: the almost exclusive presence of bones from the limbs and heads of animals and the conspicuous absence of animal torso cuts. The pork cuts found in the kitchen midden contexts around the house include cuts that in modern parlance are ham, ham-hock, and trotters as well as pig head. Of the beef represented, most of the meat came from the leg or shin, a cut currently known as beef shank, which is a slightly tougher cut that is best when slow cooked. In general, the fattier, meatier, and therefore more desirable, cuts along the belly and ribs of these animals are missing. The cuts of pork and beef recovered from the site are commonly smoked, which preserves them and allows them to be kept for a long period of time to provide food for domestic consumption. The bone assemblage suggests that the meatier and larger cuts found in an animal’s torso were likely harvested and sold while the somewhat less desirable cuts were kept and eaten on the farm itself, likely first having been preserved by smoking. That is not to say that they only consumed less profitable cuts, as sirloin is represented in the cattle cuts. Overall, however, the farm occupants seemed to find a way to both feed themselves amply and still successfully monetized their livestock via meat production for sale. It appears that livestock cultivation may have been one of the factors that made the Brumbaugh farm more successful than their neighbors; a willingness to give up the personal consumption of fattier meats in exchange for the financial benefits resulting from the sale of such cuts may have been one contributing factor in their success. The dietary trends seen in the Brumbaugh faunal assemblage seem to fit into a larger dietary pattern among German-American farmers in the nineteenth century as observed on other nineteenth-century German-American farms such as the Gibbs farm in eastern Tennessee (Mark D. Groover, The Gibbs Farmstead: Household Archaeology in an Internal Periphery, 2005). On the Gibbs farm the faunal assemblage revealed that, across all occupation periods, domestically raised animal resources accounted for at least 75% of the total faunal assemblage, which suggests a heavy reliance on farm-raised protein sources. The Gibbs farm assemblage also seems to indicate that the family’s diet was heavily reliant on pig, it being the cornerstone of their diet, supplemented to a lesser degree by cow and chicken. This trend seems to manifest on the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove farm as well, with a heavy reliance on pig and little change in diet over the span of occupation. This may suggest that the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove households were participating in a pig focused subsistence strategy that was widely employed across the Upland South region, as documented by Tanya Peres in her 2008 Historical Archaeology journal article titled Foodways, Economic Status, and the Antebellum Upland South in Central Kentucky. The scale of the smokehouse foundation (Feature 34 ) reflects the importance of meat production to the domestic economy of the farm during the mid-nineteenth century. Mid-nineteenth-century agricultural records show that the farm was grossly out-producing its neighbors in terms of swine, cattle, and sheep between 1850 and 1860. When the estate went under the management of Jacob Clare in the 1870s the production dropped off slightly, at least with regard to cattle. By the time the farm was under the tenancy of Samuel Hershey in the 1880s the raising of livestock had abated, presumably triggering the gradual abandonment of this structure. The timeline of peak meat production observed in the documentary record corresponds well with the date range of this structure’s use.
  • Analysis of the farming records and the glass assemblage suggests that the farm’s orchard may have been used not only for profit but for beverage self-sufficiency. The general absence of beverage-related glass in the artifact assemblage suggests that the occupants of the farm were not consuming bottled beverages such as beer and wine, which are common artifacts in the assemblages of towns and cities during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This would seem to suggest that the occupants of the farm were producing enough beverages for their own consumption. Beverages produced on-site in quantity, both for consumption and sale, would have been stored in casks. The records show that the farm possessed a productive orchard as early as 1870 (and possibly earlier—there is no orchard category in the agricultural censuses for 1850 or 1860). Under Susan Brumbaugh the farm was briefly involved in the production of wine, an activity not pursued by any of her neighbors. The production of wine on the farm, though small, shows that beverage production was a key component of the domestic economy. Wine, however, was far from a staple product. Andrew Brumbaugh’s ca. 1860 inventory lists a cider-house as one of the outbuildings on the site, suggesting that the orchard was being used to produce cider in quantity; a full cider house would have been unnecessary for general domestic consumption where a small press would suffice. As with their livestock consumption, they were meeting their domestic needs, principally through cider, and then monetizing the surplus.
  • The ceramic assemblages associated with the Brumbaughs show a substantial investment in locally produced red earthenwares, which accounted for more than half of the recovered ceramic material from the site. While often utilitarian, the red earthenware tradition in the Hagerstown area provided a wide range of unique and highly decorative red earthenware items that the Brumbaughs consumed. Refined earthenwares such as pearlware and whiteware were used to a lesser extent, even into the middle and late portions of the nineteenth century. The prevalence of early-to-mid-nineteenth-century, local red earthenwares in the assemblage was most likely a reflection of personal preference as opposed to market limitations as the expanding railroad and national road networks would have made non-local goods readily available. The preference for local red earthenwares from local German-American potteries cannot be ascribed to a lack of options. More likely such ceramic consumption patterns reflected a sense of local/rural and ethnic identity that was attractive to the Brumbaughs.
  • The family’s self-sufficiency and ability to monetize the farm output also provided opportunities to speculate in more progressive or innovative aspects of farming. From the time of Andrew Brumbaugh until the 1870s the farm consistently listed a high value for machinery. This suggests that the Brumbaughs—Andrew and later his remarried widow, Susan—invested in new technology to maximize their yields. Census records show that the Brumbaughs and Schindels kept a stable of 10–11 horses during the 1860s and 1870s. This is far more than would be needed for general transportation purposes. In general, keeping horses is fraught with risk, and can be resource-intensive. Horses compete with cattle and sheep for pasturage and are more prone to injury and disease than cattle. Additionally, horses are a limited-function animal that produce no saleable commodity apart from labor and transport, whereas cattle or oxen can be used for meat, milk, or labor. Was the risk worth the investment, especially given the apparent cost of keeping them healthy? While some in Washington County were raising horses for racing, the value of horses to the Brumbaugh family appears to have been more pragmatic. They appear to have needed the horses for their farm labor, specifically in operating the variety of farm machinery in which they had invested. They needed the horses to power the volume of horse-drawn equipment in which they had invested: wagons, sleighs, reaper and mowers, spring tooth horse rake, an assortment of plows, wheat drills, thresher, and separator, etc. In an age before engines, it was literally horsepower that drove the engine of the farm. While the investment may have been somewhat risky, it also seems to have been rewarding, as the farm’s crop yields for wheat were often more than three times the state average. When Andrew's estate was sold, the equipment and horses went too, and seemingly with them the productivity advantages: the farm thereafter never reached the same levels of output as seen in the previous generations of the Brumbaugh tenure.
Site Interpretations
Feature and artifact analysis was used to create a site-wide archaeological chronology for the features encountered during excavation. Site features were grouped into five broad temporal categories as shown in the figure below: late eighteenth century (1750–1800), early nineteenth century (1801–1845), mid-nineteenth century (1846–1875), late nineteenth century (1876–1900), and twentieth century (1901–2000). This grouping is based on feature date chronologies established during the artifact analysis. In some cases, a feature did not contain any diagnostic material and so could not be dated. While many such features were encountered, some of them could still be assigned a time period as they formed part of a larger feature complex that could be dated. ﷯ While these temporal categories are not strictly correlated with individual family occupations, in all cases associations can be made. The late eighteenth-century (green), early nineteenth-century (yellow), and mid-nineteenth-century (red) groupings are associated with the Brumbaugh family occupations. The late eighteenth-century grouping principally reflects Jacob Brumbaugh’s tenure, the early nineteenth-century grouping reflects Henry Brumbaugh’s tenure, and the mid-nineteenth-century group relates to the occupations of Andrew and Susan Brumbaugh. The late nineteenth-century (blue) group principally relates to the occupation of the Schindels and the dawn of the Kendle period, but the bulk of the Kendle and Grove occupations are represented by the twentieth-century (purple) group. Looking at the temporal breakdown of the features illustrated in the figure below it can be seen that those features related to late eighteenth-century occupation of the site are centered on the south side of the main house, near Feature 6, and encompass unknown outbuildings to the west. The early nineteenth-century grouping includes the large pathway complexes in the north and east yards and the stairs that lead to the basement of the northern extension of Feature 6. Additional potential outbuildings in the field to the southwest of Feature 6 suggest that the farmyard area during the early nineteenth century may have continued well south of the farmhouse. By the mid-nineteenth-century, the smokehouse (Feature 34) and its associated midden (Feature 70) were present. Late nineteenth-century features are limited to a fence line (Feature 54 complex), a privy (Feature 84), and a disturbance to one of the cobble pathways (Feature 96). The twentieth-century features principally include pipe trenches: one leading to the well, one to a water tank in the west yard, one to a septic tank inside Feature 16, and a complex of pipe trenches constituting the leach field in the fields to the south of the farmhouse. This temporal breakdown based on archaeological data provides a guide to the archaeological evidence; it shows how the built environment changed throughout the occupation history of the site, and forms a platform upon which interpretations about features and the people who made them relate to one another. The examination of features associated with the farmstead not only allowed archaeologists to understand what life was like for the people who called the farm home and to understand how the farm operated within the larger community. These broader interpretations are broken down into several categories: Click a category to learn more.
  • Throughout its long occupation, the farm’s economy seems to have been driven by a common strategy: live off what you produce, sell as much as you can, and buy as little as you can. Based on the archaeological evidence, it appears that the wealth of the farm was not spent on fine living with the frivolous consumption of food and drink. Instead, the wealth appears to have been reinvested into the farm itself in the form of machinery and infrastructure improvements. Much of the wealth the Brumbaughs amassed by this strategy was subsequently reinvested into their farm, constantly improving and embracing innovations to maximize economic output. The rewards of these endeavors appeared to be less physical and more social, with wealth gaining them local social mobility, education, and respectability beyond the reach of some of their neighbors. While not ostentatious, this investment in the property was a way of showing affluence, especially in its well-built structures such as the Swisser barn, with its decorative brick vents. The construction of income-producing structures such as a smokehouse (Feature 34) assured the continuing generation of wealth. The farm occupants also spent their money on intangibles such as education and travel. Multiple generations of Brumbaugh children were sent to school, while Henry Brumbaugh was able to leave his farm and travel to Ohio in his old age. It appears that the strategy of self-sufficiency resulted in the accumulation of enough wealth to allow the families a degree of social freedom and mobility.
  • The farm had a fairly steady emphasis on the production of cereal grains throughout its occupation, a farming strategy that seemed to remain the cornerstone of the farm’s activities. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Brumbaugh family appears to have pursued a policy of generalized agriculture that included the cultivation of a variety of cereals such as wheat, corn, barley, and rye. This was supplemented by the raising of cows and pigs and some orchard products. Jacob Brumbaugh also derived income and resources by maintaining several woodlots from which he cut and sold timber. This same type of agriculture was subsequently pursued by his son and grandsons well into the mid-nineteenth century. By this time the farm was run by Andrew Brumbaugh and it was considered an exceedingly productive Washington County farm. In his emphasis on wheat production, Andrew (and many of his neighbors) continued a local agricultural tradition with roots in the eighteenth century. Moreover, Andrew and his brother Samuel, who lived on an adjacent farm, seem to have worked collaboratively in the operation of their two farms. This strategy seems to have worked well for the family until the 1880s when the farm was divided between the descendants of Andrew and Sarah Brumbaugh with 162 3/4 acres of the original 274-acre property to be shared equally by siblings Upton Brumbaugh and Sallie Schindel and the operation of much of the farm was left to John Hershey, who rented and operated the Brumbaugh farm in exchange for a share of its harvest. According to the 1880 census, the farm’s value and formerly immense productivity seem to have declined markedly, undoubtedly as a result of its substantially reduced acreage and its transition from a family farm to a leased commercial property. While grains and hay remained important cash crops, longer-term investments such as the production of tree fruits, livestock rearing, and dairying declined markedly.
  • In contrast to cereal grain production, the raising of livestock fluctuated considerably during the mid-to late-nineteenth century, becoming a far less important contributor to the farm’s economic strategy by the Schindel period in the 1870s and remaining a lesser component thereafter. While the records demonstrate the value of swine and cattle to the farm and suggest that they were being raised in part for sale, they do not provide detail about how this practice influenced the consumption of livestock on the farm. The analysis of the meat cuts from animal bone found in archaeological deposits suggests one common thread: the almost exclusive presence of bones from the limbs and heads of animals and the conspicuous absence of animal torso cuts. The pork cuts found in the kitchen midden contexts around the house include cuts that in modern parlance are ham, ham-hock, and trotters as well as pig head. Of the beef represented, most of the meat came from the leg or shin, a cut currently known as beef shank, which is a slightly tougher cut that is best when slow cooked. In general, the fattier, meatier, and therefore more desirable, cuts along the belly and ribs of these animals are missing. The cuts of pork and beef recovered from the site are commonly smoked, which preserves them and allows them to be kept for a long period of time to provide food for domestic consumption. The bone assemblage suggests that the meatier and larger cuts found in an animal’s torso were likely harvested and sold while the somewhat less desirable cuts were kept and eaten on the farm itself, likely first having been preserved by smoking. That is not to say that they only consumed less profitable cuts, as sirloin is represented in the cattle cuts. Overall, however, the farm occupants seemed to find a way to both feed themselves amply and still successfully monetized their livestock via meat production for sale. It appears that livestock cultivation may have been one of the factors that made the Brumbaugh farm more successful than their neighbors; a willingness to give up the personal consumption of fattier meats in exchange for the financial benefits resulting from the sale of such cuts may have been one contributing factor in their success. The dietary trends seen in the Brumbaugh faunal assemblage seem to fit into a larger dietary pattern among German-American farmers in the nineteenth century as observed on other nineteenth-century German-American farms such as the Gibbs farm in eastern Tennessee (Mark D. Groover, The Gibbs Farmstead: Household Archaeology in an Internal Periphery, 2005). On the Gibbs farm the faunal assemblage revealed that, across all occupation periods, domestically raised animal resources accounted for at least 75% of the total faunal assemblage, which suggests a heavy reliance on farm-raised protein sources. The Gibbs farm assemblage also seems to indicate that the family’s diet was heavily reliant on pig, it being the cornerstone of their diet, supplemented to a lesser degree by cow and chicken. This trend seems to manifest on the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove farm as well, with a heavy reliance on pig and little change in diet over the span of occupation. This may suggest that the Brumbaugh-Kendle-Grove households were participating in a pig focused subsistence strategy that was widely employed across the Upland South region, as documented by Tanya Peres in her 2008 Historical Archaeology journal article titled Foodways, Economic Status, and the Antebellum Upland South in Central Kentucky. The scale of the smokehouse foundation (Feature 34 ) reflects the importance of meat production to the domestic economy of the farm during the mid-nineteenth century. Mid-nineteenth-century agricultural records show that the farm was grossly out-producing its neighbors in terms of swine, cattle, and sheep between 1850 and 1860. When the estate went under the management of Jacob Clare in the 1870s the production dropped off slightly, at least with regard to cattle. By the time the farm was under the tenancy of Samuel Hershey in the 1880s the raising of livestock had abated, presumably triggering the gradual abandonment of this structure. The timeline of peak meat production observed in the documentary record corresponds well with the date range of this structure’s use.
  • Analysis of the farming records and the glass assemblage suggests that the farm’s orchard may have been used not only for profit but for beverage self-sufficiency. The general absence of beverage-related glass in the artifact assemblage suggests that the occupants of the farm were not consuming bottled beverages such as beer and wine, which are common artifacts in the assemblages of towns and cities during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This would seem to suggest that the occupants of the farm were producing enough beverages for their own consumption. Beverages produced on-site in quantity, both for consumption and sale, would have been stored in casks. The records show that the farm possessed a productive orchard as early as 1870 (and possibly earlier—there is no orchard category in the agricultural censuses for 1850 or 1860). Under Susan Brumbaugh the farm was briefly involved in the production of wine, an activity not pursued by any of her neighbors. The production of wine on the farm, though small, shows that beverage production was a key component of the domestic economy. Wine, however, was far from a staple product. Andrew Brumbaugh’s ca. 1860 inventory lists a cider-house as one of the outbuildings on the site, suggesting that the orchard was being used to produce cider in quantity; a full cider house would have been unnecessary for general domestic consumption where a small press would suffice. As with their livestock consumption, they were meeting their domestic needs, principally through cider, and then monetizing the surplus.
  • The ceramic assemblages associated with the Brumbaughs show a substantial investment in locally produced red earthenwares, which accounted for more than half of the recovered ceramic material from the site. While often utilitarian, the red earthenware tradition in the Hagerstown area provided a wide range of unique and highly decorative red earthenware items that the Brumbaughs consumed. Refined earthenwares such as pearlware and whiteware were used to a lesser extent, even into the middle and late portions of the nineteenth century. The prevalence of early-to-mid-nineteenth-century, local red earthenwares in the assemblage was most likely a reflection of personal preference as opposed to market limitations as the expanding railroad and national road networks would have made non-local goods readily available. The preference for local red earthenwares from local German-American potteries cannot be ascribed to a lack of options. More likely such ceramic consumption patterns reflected a sense of local/rural and ethnic identity that was attractive to the Brumbaughs.
  • The family’s self-sufficiency and ability to monetize the farm output also provided opportunities to speculate in more progressive or innovative aspects of farming. From the time of Andrew Brumbaugh until the 1870s the farm consistently listed a high value for machinery. This suggests that the Brumbaughs—Andrew and later his remarried widow, Susan—invested in new technology to maximize their yields. Census records show that the Brumbaughs and Schindels kept a stable of 10–11 horses during the 1860s and 1870s. This is far more than would be needed for general transportation purposes. In general, keeping horses is fraught with risk, and can be resource-intensive. Horses compete with cattle and sheep for pasturage and are more prone to injury and disease than cattle. Additionally, horses are a limited-function animal that produce no saleable commodity apart from labor and transport, whereas cattle or oxen can be used for meat, milk, or labor. Was the risk worth the investment, especially given the apparent cost of keeping them healthy? While some in Washington County were raising horses for racing, the value of horses to the Brumbaugh family appears to have been more pragmatic. They appear to have needed the horses for their farm labor, specifically in operating the variety of farm machinery in which they had invested. They needed the horses to power the volume of horse-drawn equipment in which they had invested: wagons, sleighs, reaper and mowers, spring tooth horse rake, an assortment of plows, wheat drills, thresher, and separator, etc. In an age before engines, it was literally horsepower that drove the engine of the farm. While the investment may have been somewhat risky, it also seems to have been rewarding, as the farm’s crop yields for wheat were often more than three times the state average. When Andrew's estate was sold, the equipment and horses went too, and seemingly with them the productivity advantages: the farm thereafter never reached the same levels of output as seen in the previous generations of the Brumbaugh tenure.